Complementing the
current abundance of electronically and digitally mediated performance, a new
importance accrues to the composed live presence of actors who are unmediated
and unassisted by technology on stage, yet who perform pattern and form more complex
than what electronic processes have so far allowed to the live performer. As
technology can alter forms of behavior in daily life, so too can live theatre
make new forms of daily life behavior that alter the meaning of “technology.”
On the strength of what is commonly called “intimacy” in theatre, an elaborate
ephemeral artifice of multiple times and places, and near-impossible
laminations of speech and gesture, can be sustained on stage using no more than
live unassisted human movement and voice. Our interest is in laying new ground
for form in theatre in a way that makes the term theatre composition
meaningfully analogous to music composition. Two families of technique we
generated for this project we name pivot-montage and counter-intuitive
behavior; together they form the basis of a system for theatre composition.

Introduction

The description that follows is partly a
report on some of the progress in the research of our work, partly a
description of pieces in our current repertory, and partly a projection of
imagined theatre pieces we know can be made and hope to engage others in making
along with us in this unfolding project. In the text there is a convergence and
mixing of these three functions. This is where we’re at. The two themes are
selected from among other ideas not written about here. The article is
addressed to those who are making theatre and who are intent on generating new
theatre in types of possible human behavior not yet seen as a resource, though
eminently available to composition. This article is an attempt to describe and
propose two components of a creative “technology” of acting, with the hope that
this way of working can lead to theatrical creations engaging with our humanity
through meaningful structural complexity and formal depth.

Pivot-Montage

Theatre artists cannot avoid one simple requirement of their work. That is, a
scene must begin and it must end. The maker of theatre produces a fictional
time and place environment with actors as inhabitants. It is bounded.

There are many theatrical conventions practiced in order to meet this
requirement. They include curtains rising and falling, lights coming up and
down, actors entering and leaving the stage, audiences entering and leaving the
theatre, bowing, clapping, new scenery, musical cues, the appearance of an
announcer, and other practices involving projectors, loud-speakers, and
computers. All of these ways are used to demarcate the boundaries of the
beginning of the audience’s view into the time and place of a work, an act, an
event or a scene, and the ending of that view. The scene might project the
illusion of having a past and a future, but all the audience is privy to is
what they can observe of what they are shown, and that view has a beginning and
an ending. That view is bounded.

System
of pivot-montage relations for "Action at a Distance"

In our work over the past twenty years,
we have taken this constraint as a challenge to invent a new premise, in the
form of what we have named pivot-montage, and through the technique we
have named pivoting. The premise of pivot-montage is that the
necessary boundary markers for viewing a theatrical scene, the demarcations of
the starting and stopping moments bounding each scene, be created on stage by
the actor or actors who perform gestural-vocal non sequiturs. The technique for
performing a non sequitur, the pivot, is a gesture of the actor’s body
and voice as a whole. It is a gesture formed when the actor’s body and voice
(performing a character) arrives at a moment and position in one scene’s
fiction that is identical to a moment and position of the actor’s body and
voice (performing a character) in another scene’s fiction as if two scenes
happening simultaneously on stage suddenly crossed paths. Using this
conjunction of two scenes, a switch can occur. The actor can proceed seamlessly
without slowing down, to “jump track” from the moving body of the character of
the one scene into the moving body of the character of the other scene, cutting
mid-word and mid-action from the one into mid-word and mid-action of the other.
In this convergence of two scenes, two possible worlds, the path taken and the
abandoned alternative touch in the moment of the pivot.

This change is accomplished through a
precise stop-start of every variable aspect of the actor’s body and voice
simultaneously and without the use of any transition time, pose, external
signal, or stage convention. The frame of the actor’s presence changes
immediately from one fictional time and place to another without imputing to
the theatrical content any cause, reason or explanation for the change. Rather
than content, story, or character, it is the logic of the composed form that
motivates the change. The more natural the acting, the more unnaturally jolting
is the intervention of a pivot, and the more likely is the viewer to grasp a
pivot as an abstraction, a gesture in form that is an element of a formal
system.

A pivot is perceivable only in retrospect
for it doesn’t “happen” until the pivotal moment is in the past, until the
current scene is already juxtaposed against the memory of the previous scene,
and the viewer discovers the frame of the action in the action. The moment the
pivot “takes place” has no duration of its own. It is gone when it happens.

To the actor, the experience of moving through a pivot is that of performing a
hybrid gesture, part in scene A and part in scene B. While maintaining the
predictable momentum of the present action A to the audience, and even
stressing that predictability, the actor’s mind is already actively fixed on
the next scene B, and internally setting the body and voice to perform the
torque of the pivot into the next scene without hesitation, without perceivable
preparation, without any pause. What to the viewer appears as missing action
lost suddenly between A and B, to the actor is the action AB itself. The actor
is called upon to perform a non sequitur in movement and voice in the medium of
the actor’s continuous presence.

This technique can be appreciated by
anyone who wishes that an actor could indicate not only the time and place of a
character’s environment or even a change from one character to another, but
also a sequence of times and places and a pattern of times and places as
inventively as a music composer can employ enharmonic change in modulating from
one key to another or a film editor can fabricate a montage of many shots. In
the play of alternatives made available by the pivot technique, the creator of
theatrical events is able to compose sequences and patterns of time-place
framed events in a system of juxtaposition. The pivot technique allows the
actor and the maker of theatre not only to put the frame into the picture, but
also to insert as many frames in any sequence and pattern desired, as serves
the artists’ idea.

Frames can be juxtaposed in patterns
limited only by parameters of performability, and the composer’s imagination
for scenic geometry. Scenes can be made that last only a few seconds or a
fraction of a second: just long enough for the audience to establish in their
minds that such a scene is happening before it is gone. Or scenes can be as
long as a whole act of a typical play. An entire composition might be only
several minutes long or a whole evening, composed of a few scenes or hundreds.
A scene cut off at a certain moment can be picked up again later at that “same”
moment, and carried forward as if the original scene continues, much like a
scene made by a film editor can include a shot that returns to action seen
earlier, picking it up at the moment the action left off.

Any actor or group of actors on stage, at
any prepared moment, can be made to pivot out of the frame of one scene and
into the frame of another regardless of what any additional actors might be
doing. Once it has been seen that at least one actor has pivoted independently
of the others, that they have parted ways, actors on stage together can play
characters in different time-place environments; while the actors might come
physically close to one another on stage, the fictional distance between their
characters is sustained by the demonstrated mutual exclusivity of their
time-place environments. Two actors, performing characters in different
fictional environments, perform the characters’ mutual non-existence. Unless
one joins the environment of the other, or both pivot into a third environment
together, they register no interaction.

An environment, in the sense used here,
is established by an actor who, in character, generates the fiction of a time
and place other than that of the audience, in which the character dwells. The
composer can work at one time with up to as many environments on stage as there
are actors, and no more, since each character inhabits only one environment at
a time, and no environment exists unless it is populated.

Other ways have been used to sustain the
fiction of actors occupying multiple and simultaneous times and places on
stage. These have been conventions correctly understood by audiences to apply
externally to the acting. They have not been incorporated as structural
features of the acting itself. The theatre maker uses pivot-montage to
establish the time-place frames of acting in the acting, as a
formally constructed non sequitur of movement and voice. For the audience, the
frame of the action is understood in the action.

Score excerpt from “Three Pink Men Play
Tiddlywinks at Half Past Five”

Working in this way, the maker of theatre must consider what are to be
the scenes, their sequences, how many characters in each scene, and the nuance
determining at which exact movement and syllable will one scene cut off and
catch the first movement and syllable of the following scene for each actor.
With the ability to compose complex sequences and juxtapositions of time-place
bounded environments — the viewer guided by pivots — the artist can
create effects comparable to effects created technologically, yet do so within
a technology of human behavior specific to the irreducible medium of
performed live presence.

Making notations and scores for theatre
works, as music composers do for music compositions, the theatre artist can
work between idea and performance in a way that is vastly different from
writing dialogue, making sketches, documenting with video, improvising in the
studio, working with computer, or “devising” as generally practiced. Terms like
scale, key, meter, rhythm, harmony, dissonance, chord, melody, tone,
orchestration and other musical terms — including some from composing
with computer — serve in the working vocabulary of composers of theatre.
A composition in theatre with many actors showing characters in many times and
places simultaneously, alternating, and interwoven, can approach the complexity
of a composition for a musical quartet, for a chamber orchestra, or for computer.

The orchestration that is possible with
an ensemble of actors pivoting into and out of one another’s framed time-place
environments, or crossing together from one environment to another, gives form
in art to the fantastic complexity of an ordinary day in the life of an
individual, into whose time-place environment numerous others arrive from
“nowhere” and share a mutually bounded present for a short time (a minute, a
day, a lifetime) before disappearing out of bounds. Through the montage of
multiple appearances in one’s environment, the presences of other people take
on pattern and form in one’s life, surrounding one with the immediate
experience of a social system.

Complementary to the current abundance of
electronically and digitally mediated interaction, a new importance accrues to
the composed live presence of actors who are unmediated, yet who perform
complex pattern and form different from what electronic and digital processes
encompass. As technology can alter forms of behavior in daily life, so too can
live theatre make new forms of daily life behavior that alter the meaning of
“technology.”

Rather than the presence of actors linked
with electronic media, the pivot technique requires the unlinked live presence
of actors for its implementation. Audiences viewing compositions using
pivot-montage fare best in small theatre spaces that bring actors within
proximity that could support conversation between actors and audience. On the
strength of what is commonly called intimacy, an elaborate ephemeral artifice
of multiple times and places, and near-impossible laminations of speech and
gesture, can be sustained on stage using no more than live unassisted human
movement and voice.

Pivot-montage in live performance is akin
to the montage of cinema in that every pivot seems to hold fast the two actions
it cuts together in sequential juxtaposition. Missing events are implied: the
action that could have followed from the scene cut off, were it not cut off,
and the action that could have preceded the scene that is suddenly now in
progress, were we able to share its history, are irresistibly imagined by the
viewer. These action “shadows” are inherent to the illusion of the pivot; they
are the illusion of missing action in missing time and space, and seem “as if”
to have happened.

Watching actors employ pivot-montage on
stage, the sensation might arise in the viewer that the actors are exhibiting
not only the shifting times and places in the work, but also a peculiar mode of
behavior. It might seem to be the behavior of people who have the benefit of a
second time dimension implied by the way they move, act and speak — a
dimension beyond the sensed time in which the viewer is socially practiced.
These characters would appear to be unbounded by the continuity in time and
space usually attributed to the presence of a person. If there were
people living in a social system preferable to all the ones we know, and if
their behavior in this social system could be observed by us, we might see
enviable evidence of such a dimensional freedom of time and timing. This
behavior can be composed in theatre.

Counter-Intuitive Behavior

If it can be expected
that new social organization, new culture and new political and economic
structures will be accompanied by new behavior on even so minute a scale as the
way one person moves in relation to another person during conversation, then a
kind of reverse archeology of behavior can be practiced. In this excavation
game of reverse archaeology, we can imagine an artifact of behavior found in a
future society, extract it, and bring it home to the present. We can even put
it on a stage and let it show us something we haven’t seen before. It may
entice us to infer the context from which it emerged and that context might be
a society in which all forms of violence are relics of an abandoned past. Or it
may convey to us a brief image of human society in which the meeting of basic
needs has been continuously and unconditionally fulfilled, a time and place in
which people are intent upon problems of ever finer living. Such behavioral
artifacts can be a source of techniques for theatre artists at present. The
techniques might result in performance that is as strange to contemporary
sensibilities as would be the society from whose behavioral
artifacts they were derived.

"Bunraku" notation model

We can simulate such artifacts by
answering questions like “What have people never been seen to do in daily-life
interaction?” or “What is considered impossible in human behavior?” or “What is
the human nervous system organized specifically not to do?” Answers can be
attempted by analyzing everyday observable behavior into a number of
distinguishable components, studying the possible and performable relations
between components, and synthesizing them into a newly invented whole. The
components drawn from everyday behavior would be immediately performable, but
the invented reorganization of those components would require the actor to
master counter-intuitive behavior. Behavior is counter-intuitive that is never
performed by a person in present day society unless they become aware of,
learn, and perfect that performance, against the grain of their nervous system
as it functions in daily life. When performed, counter-intuitive behavior looks
suspiciously wrong as we might hope a glimpse of a future would look when
viewed in the present context.

If the components are familiar – familiar timing
patterns of gesture, familiar vocal sound phrasings, the situating of movement
in a familiar social interaction – while the new organization of these
components involves seemingly impossible juxtapositions of gesture patterns,
vocal phrasings, and movements culled and laminated together from various
scenes that appear dispersed in time and space and might seem to have nothing
to do with one another, then in this game of reverse archeology we can imagine
we have an ‘artifact of behavior’ not from the present but from a future.
In performance, each actor would perform a stream of such ongoing “impossible”
juxtaposition with fluidity, as if it were normal behavior in an unknown
society. In an imaginative sense, a performance would offer an audience a look
at what could be created of individual presence in society, were people to act
outside the margins of currently “real” human behavior, not so much in content
but in form. The rehearsal of a play could be a rehearsal of a novel form
of social existence.

To take one example, counter-intuitive
behavior might require the actor to develop the ability to maintain two
distinct speech channels at the same time: one through the actor’s visible
action (including all the tiny body rhythms of speech including the visible
gestures of the face, head, and to the greatest extent possible, the mouth and
breath) and another through the same actor’s audible voice (the actor’s live
audible voice speaking lines in a scene we can thus hear but do not see
happening.) It would be as if the actor is engaged in dialogue with two
partners in two different realities at exactly the same time, one engagement
through their visible ‘speech’ and the other through their audible voice. The
acting would be split down the center between visible and audible and the two
could very well contradict one another. The speaking seen and the speech
heard would run concurrently, yet maintain a continuous dissociation from one
another, like a pivot maintained over time.

The skill necessary to perform such behavior puts a
counter-intuitive twist into the problems of acting. The actor’s body projects
two different states of mind, and thus two emotional settings. The actor
performs emotional conflict: not emotional conflict within a single character’s
psyche or between one character and another character, but emotional conflict
between two characters in one actor. The actor performs a relation between
characters, the character the audience can watch and the character the audience
can hear.

The dialogical performance becomes
embodied dialectic.

In order to profile this ‘twoness’ of
character, the actor must demonstrate incompatibility between their visible
movement rhythm and their audible vocal rhythm, both drawn from material of
ordinary speech behavior. Since acting, visual and audible, involves
controlled display of emotional states, the actor would have to craft a state
of physically evident emotional conflict and learn to control, style, and perform
it with virtuoso affect – two distinquishable emotional states in one
body and one voice – somewhat analogously to polyphony. What can
eventually become familiar to an actor as self-induced emotional conflict and
cognitive dissonance — crafted through technique — can appear to
the audience as contradiction and paradox.

Audience members can be witness to
choreographed relations in movement – direction, speed, timing, sequence,
effort, intensity, weight distribution, etc. – between characters in
different environments, in disassociated scenes – and who by virtue of
being in different environments, different scenes, show no cognizance of each
other’s existence.Such
choreography designed by a theatre maker, enacted by actors, would convey no
dramatic logic or meaning within any of the scenes depicted.Nonetheless, the specificity of the
choreography can be extreme, and have dramatic logic and meaning of its
own.The direction, speed, timing,
sequence, effort, intensity, weight distribution, etc. of a character who is
delicately setting a table with crystal, can be coordinated with the direction,
speed, timing, sequence, effort, intensity, weight distribution, etc. of a
group of characters in a different environment who are joking around and
laughing.Diverse activity across
scenes can be matched, offset, in counterpoint, harmonized, contrasted,
syncopated,or related through any
variable and to any degree of observable action chosen by the choreographer, whether
the linked action be in only one variable, such as rhythm, or in many.

Such movement composition is analogous to
the complexity and ingenuity of dance choreography.We call this technique of
counter-intuitive behavior “uncanny coordination” to emphasize that such
coordinationoccurs between
characters who show no hint of awareness, intention or even consciousness that
their movements have any existence outside of the scene, the environment, in
which they occur.Behavior within
accepted parameters of everyday and mundane existence is not thought to be
available for design at this level of detail and precision.Inconsequential similarity and
difference of movement between one way of “reaching for a chair” in scene A,
and another way of “reaching for a chair” in scene B that leave both ways identical
under the perception and language of “reaching for a chair” can be highly
consequential and meaningful in the perception and language of the choreography
that spans both A and B.

This uncanny coordination can be familiar
and strange at the same time, ordinary and yet predetermined to an impossible
degree, accidental and finely tuned – a dance of dramatic
coincidence.This technique too is
part of the repertory of techniques of counter-intuitive behaviors, not within
what a character is seen to do, but only arising between characters, when an
observer watches two or more characters at the same time.Uncanny coordination is not a feature of
a character, but a composite quality of a group of characters.The gesture of uncanny coordination is
not the gesture of individuals, but the gesture of society.

We
can imagine a theatre in which a pool of natural everyday occurrences –
going to work, coming home, making dinner, and all the minute movements of
daily life – is covered by a surface membrane on which ripples (of
pivot-montage, dualistic speaking, uncanny coordination, etc.) make patterns
that originate in disturbances from distant realities, which we can perceive
only through understanding the ripples – a kind of astrophysics of human
relationships, or, a sensation on the eardrums of another person’s voice.
It would be as if the mundane momentary reality were to acquire a medium in
which to decipher interference patterns, a radar station for world events. Such
speculations are the material of theatre.

When the full set of
these and other counter-intuitive techniques is combined with pivot-montage, a
systematic whole takes form. Applied by an ensemble, the actors would be
able to perform densely orchestrated works in which actors, characters, voices,
texts, movement, gesture, action, interaction, emotional expression, dialogue,
and all the familiar components of theatre are redistributed and recombined in
complex and unfamiliar patterns. Distributions can be made in which components
of a single character are spread over several actors, and in which components
of multiple characters are compacted into one actor.

A character in a
theatre so configured might appear as a system of characteristics rather than
as a character in the usual sense. A character could be the expression of the
logic of a composed pattern rather than the illusion of a whole biological
human being modeled by an actor. Such theatre might engage by analogy with the
distant existences of the billions of human beings one will never see nor meet,
and whose kaleidoscopic time-place environments one can share only through a
leap of intellect, art, and ethical sensibility. Characters might appear to the
viewer’s imagination like strangely comported visitors from an excavated
possible society, who act in a way we might want to study and know more about.
At least, the artifacts of their behavior would provide us with provocative
material for practical research on the stage.

The task envisioned is posed in the question
“Now that people are prone to cognize events in time and space through their
perceptual experiences with electronically and digitally mediated realities,
what can happen, now conceivable for the first time, if we invent techniques
for movement, speech, gesture, and the construction of events in fictional time
and space for the live, unassisted, unmediated human actor — techniques
that are meaningful to those ‘literate’ in the sensing of electronic media
— and build new live performance forms to challenge the abilities of
media-cultured audiences?”

What is envisioned is that we discover and invent newly
performable techniques through the use of all types of electronic and digital
manipulations prior to the creation of a performance, learn from these
manipulations, practice with them, but then compose the unassisted live acting
of performers, using the formal design of human behavior only now possible,
because now conceivable, with the knowledge garnered through the most advanced
means – transformed into a technology of human social presence on stage.

Another domain of experimentation
that opens up, uncanny coordination, stems from the fact that in the
ordinary daily life of moving about and doing things, a person chooses
how to move not only consciously but unconsciously. For practical
purposes, many variations on a way of doing something are functionally
equivalent in our thinking. It usually doesn’t matter to what
extent the wrist moves before the elbow or whether the few steps to the
counter begin on the left leg or the right leg. And on a
micro-level, it hardly ever makes a difference (consciously that is)
what all the little timings are, or the rhythmic relations between
parts of the body. However, on a stage, particularly on our stage
of counter-intuitive behavior, we can pick and choose to any degree
of precision among all the ways of accomplishing "the same
thing." And so, if we become assiduous about our choosing, we can
choose for an actor, from the palette of available ways of doing, just
that one way that happens to share the exact timing pattern of attack
and decay, of start and stop of movement, (and of direction, distance,
duration, intensity, speed, acceleration, pathway, etc.) as another actor’s movement.
But either actor is still portraying ‘natural’ action, and either
character is oblivious to the coordination they participate in.
It ‘just so happens’ that the rhythm of two or more characters seems
locked together (or syncopated, or in counterpoint, or in elaborate
design) and so seems to exhibit a strange and compelling choreography hidden
within the still natural-seeming scene, an uncanny coordination.
The clash of reality value between the choreographic scaffolding and
the naturalistic acting would be the shocking effect of uncanny
anti-naturalism implanted into the natural.

We
can imagine a theatre in which a pool of natural everyday
occurrences – going to work, coming home, making dinner, and all the
minute movements of daily life – is covered by a surface membrane on
which ripples (of pivot-montage, dualistic speaking, uncanny
coordinations, etc.) make patterns that indicate disturbances from
distant events which we can perceive through understanding the
ripples. It would be as if the mundane reality were a medium in
which to decifer interference patterns, like a radar station bouncing
its continuous beams off world events.

When the
full set of these and other counter-intuitive techniques is combined
with pivot-montage, a systematic whole takes form. Applied by an
ensemble, the actors would be able to perform densely orchestrated
works in which actors, characters, voices, texts, movement, gesture,
action, interaction, emotional expression, dialogue, and all the
familiar components of theatre are redistributed and recombined in
complex and unfamiliar patterns. Distributions can be made in which
components of a single character are spread over several actors, and in
which components of multiple characters are compacted into one actor.

A character in a theatre so
configured might appear as a system of characteristics rather than as a
character in the usual sense. A character could be the expression of
the logic of a composed pattern rather than the illusion of a
whole biological human being modeled by an actor. Such theatre might engage
by analogy with the distant existences of the billions of human beings
one will never see nor meet, and whose kaleidoscopic time-place
environments one can share only through a leap of intellect, art, and
ethical sensibility. Characters might appear to the viewer’s
imagination like strangely comported visitors from an excavated
possible society, who act in a way we might want to study and know more
about. At least, the artifacts of their behavior would provide us with
provocative material for practical research on the stage.

The task envisioned is posed in the question “Now that people are prone
to cognize events in time and space through their perceptual
experiences with electronically and digitally mediated realities, what
can happen, now conceivable for the first time, if we invent techniques
for movement, speech, gesture, and the construction of events in
fictional time and space for the live, unassisted, unmediated human
actor — techniques that are meaningful to those ‘literate’ in the
sensing of electronic media — and build new live performance forms to
challenge the abilities of media-cultured audiences?”
What is envisioned is that we discover and invent newly performable
techniques through the use of all types of electronic and digital
manipulations prior to the creation of a performance, learn from these manipulations,
practice with them, but then compose the unassisted live acting of
performers, using the formal design of human behavior only now
possible, because now conceivable, with the knowledge garnered through
the most advanced means – transformed into a technology of human social presence on stage.